ibutsu.org

kivikakk.ee

Snapchat: not for state secrets

https://kivikakk.ee/2013/05/10/snapchat.html

Snapchat: not for state secrets. It’s an app where you can take a photo or short ( 10 second) video and send it to your friends who use the service; they’ll then be able to see it, once, before it disappears forever. Ostensibly, the app is for sexting, because there’s no fear that your photo will get spread around (no forwarding/etc.) or retained for longer than you’d like, but it seems like it’s not as much a sexter’s hangout as the media might want you to think. Wherever we see him. To re-route the pho...

kivikakk.ee

Erlang is slow: and other rubbish

https://kivikakk.ee/2013/05/20/erlang_is_slow.html

Erlang is slow: and other rubbish. How and Why We Switched from Erlang to Python. Tells an intern’s tale, from whose perspective it runs like this: we used Erlang, No one on our team is an Erlang expert (despite how crucial this service is to our product! And also would you please suspend brain activity while I make some performance claims. Hold your horses. The good decision to rewrite critical services in a language they actually know aside, let’s look at their notes on perf:. Simplejson is written in C.

kivikakk.ee

Contrigraph: drawing in GitHub

https://kivikakk.ee/2013/05/07/contrigraph.html

Contrigraph: drawing in GitHub. A data visualisation (? Created by generating commits to match the Contribution Graph Shirt. It was pretty much a hack; first, I read the colours straight off the shirt, producing a big block of data like. 0002342 2223322 2323241 2224333 3322122 2242231 . Then we read that in one digit at a time, work out what day to start on so everything aligns correctly, and how many commits on a given day produce each gradient of colour. The result isn’t pretty:. In retrospect, I shoul...

kivikakk.ee

VSTO and COM objects

https://kivikakk.ee/2014/04/05/vsto-and-com-objects.html

VSTO and COM objects. It’s impressive how hard it is to use VSTO correctly. When a COM handle crosses from unmanaged into managed code for the first time, a runtime callable wrapper is created for it. This wrapper maintains a reference count, incremented whenever the object is newly requested across the boundary. You can force the matter by decrementing the reference count on the RCW yourself: Marshal.ReleaseComObject. If each call to Marshal.ReleaseComObject. But an MSDN blog disagrees.

kivikakk.ee

Bemani IFS extractor

https://kivikakk.ee/2014/04/20/bemani-ifs-extractor.html

I made an extractor for Bemani IFS files. It’s been done a few times before, but this one’s reasonably usable compared to drag and drop one file on this program, which spawns 50 files more, each of which you drag on this program to decompress, then each decompressed file to another program which spits up a window and has you drag a slider around until it looks right. You can open an IFS file and browse the data therein without saving them all out to a file.

kivikakk.ee

k6_bytea

https://kivikakk.ee/2013/05/13/k6_bytea.html

I’ve started a project in Erlang recently, and I needed a big block of mutable memory a massive byte array, buffer, whatever you want to call it. Erlang’s binary strings are immutable and so probably not suitable. I figured the core distribution must’ve had something like this nope. Spending 30 minutes Googling and checking docs twice and thrice over, but there’s clearly no mutable byte array in Erlang itself. Is there a hack that approximates to this? Search this StackOverflow almost seems hopeful.

kivikakk.ee

Time zones in .NET

https://kivikakk.ee/2013/09/12/time_zones_in_.net.html

Time zones in .NET. I’m a fairly new .NET developer. I worked with the framework a bit in 2005 6, but hadn’t really touched it since then. In the meantime, I’ve been sticking to the Linux ecosystem, and a little OS X, as mentioned in a previous article. So, time zones. I know they’re a sore point for many environments, but most seem to dig themselves out of the hole and provide something that is, in the end, usable. Is actually pretty darn good, and if you use Rails, ActiveSupport makes it even better.

kivikakk.ee

Inefficiences and insufficiencies: C++, others

https://kivikakk.ee/2013/05/13/inefficiency.html

Inefficiences and insufficiencies: C , others. Lately I’ve been game programming. A few things have been coming to mind:. The Sapir Whorf hypothesis. Is totally true when it comes to programming languages. Dynamically typed languages encourage a whole lot of waste. There’s some sweet spot of expressivity, low level and non-shoot-yourself-in-the-footness in language that’s missing. I will attempt to expound. 15 Ruby 9 OCaml 6 Go 6 Javascript 4 C 3 C 2 Clojure 3 Perl 2 Haskell . Choosing C to write a game ...

kivikakk.ee

Being sorta useful in vim

https://kivikakk.ee/2014/04/19/being-sorta-useful-in-vim.html

Being sorta useful in vim. This is a semi-comprehensive, non-prosaic (but hardly poetic) reference to vim. Approach with caution. Move the cursor, delete, enter insert mode, delete then insert, enter visual mode, yank and put (copy and paste). Type stuff, move the cursor, scroll, put. Do things to the selected area, move your cursor about within it. Where your deleted and yanked text goes. Even more ways to select text. What haven’t I covered? This text is in the public domain. Moves a word forward.